5 EDITORIAL After having taken, a couple of years ago, a critical look at the state of government and democracy (lo Squaderno no. 9), we have devoted our present little investigation in this issue to tackling the impact of the current crisis. Since we believe that this is not only an economic crisis but also a social, cultural and civilisational one one that literally calls into question the ancient notion of civilitas we have collected various contributions that outline the main aspects of the ongoing crisis, flesh out the lessons we can draw from it and, ultimately, imagine alternatives to overcome it. If, as classically pointed out by Karl Marx, capitalism and crisis are intertwined, what about the relationships between capitalism and utopia? Whereas friction-free consumption has been the dominant narrative of the neoliberal age, which other hegemonic and counter-hegemonic utopias have appeared in the meanwhile? What is the role of technology in these utopian discourses and practices? How has technology shaped utopia and how has it been shaped by it? Indeed, technology has represented one of the core elements of the dominant model of development which is currently undergoing a deep crisis: what are the features, the rhetoric and the logic of technological utopianism coupled with the narrative of infinite economic growth? More specifically, how has the last wave of information and communication technologies reshaped utopia through the promise of a new etopian network society? Which are the points of continuity and which those of discontinuity and even rupture between technological utopianism, capitalism and democracy? How did utopia, as a motivational and inspiring collective ideology, support historical moments of democratic self-determination, and how did it ultimately to retrieve Max Weber lend a spirit to capitalism? And conversely, what kind of consciousness can spring from crisis? To our mind, similar questions call for an overall rethinking of utopia as well its uncanny doubles: dystopia, heterotopia, ecotopia, etopia, privatopia, atmotopia etc. in the context of the modern project of democracy. Utopia has represented both a radical dimension of emancipation and a forcible dream of governmentality; indeed, as Blokker argues convincingly in the opening article, multiple imaginations of the democratic project have always existed and are coessential to modernity. As an illustration of one among these, Dennis invites us to imagine how a post-autopia scenery might look like, and suggests that a digital mobility nexus might well turn into a veritable dystopia. On her turn, Moschella contributes with an analysis of the financial crisis from the perspective of the scope for viable market regulation; she concludes that the neoliberal consensus based on market self-discipline and light-touch regulation is not yet overcome. Mubi then proposes a brief excursus through twentieth-century architectural utopias and their legacy. Re-examining the legacy of classical utopian thinking is the focus of the two following articles in literary studies: Laino reconstructs the shift from modern utopias to postmodern heterotopias in the Western novel and literary criticism, highlighting the transformations and new possibilities of resistance that open up; while Brodesco chooses Peter Weiss play Marat/Sade as a crucial text to reflect on the meaning of modern utopia, as the setting of the play the asylum of Charenton as well as its central characters the revolutionary and the sadist contain its essential elements. Two other contributions by Pisanu and Russo are interested in the ways in which technology has changed social spaces. Pisanu suggests that recognition of the social shaping of technology pushes us beyond technological determinism, while Russo considers the promise of digital humanities for the future of intellectual property. In a more general concluding reflexion, Mubi looks at utopias, dystopias and heterotopias as total social places, suggesting that crisis might provide us with a potential moment of visibilisation of many implicit assumptions made in the constitution of such total social places. AMB, PS, AF 5

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9 Utopian Politics or the Politics of Uncertainty? Paul Blokker The global financial crisis seems to have largely invoked two types of political reaction. These reactions can be understood as mere responses as how to deal most effectively with the crisis immediate economic implications, but they can also be seen in a broader sense, as I will do here, as reflecting a kind of political repertoire or cultural image of politics. This image of politics involves understandings of what politics stands for, what can be achieved by it, and who needs to be involved. I will suggest that the currently invoked understandings of politics imply in some ways outmoded and problematic forms of modern politics, which are unlikely to lead to the resolution of the crisis of post-industrial society in a structural sense. One reaction, an apparently authentic invocation of a need for radical change, was articulated by some (probably most vocally by Nicolas Sarkozy) in the early days of the crisis. One, paradoxical, sign of this need for a radical rupture with the laissez-faire ideology of neoliberalism was the choice by the French review Le Figaro to nominate John Maynard Keynes as l homme de l année The radical change was to involve a renewed appreciation of state intervention in the economy, against the disembedded nature of the global market, as well as the idea of the national economy as a separate and self-sufficient unity as such. A second reaction, arguably by now the prevailing one, is the call for a return to the status quo ante. In Europe, one expression of this view is the attempt to return to the orthodox monetarism of the European Stability and Growth Pact, which underpins the Euro, but this time the pact would need to be supported by real, politically enforceable, sanctions. Both responses are, it can however be argued, ultimately inadequate in that they invoke a form of utopian politics that reminds us of the bygone days of early modernity. That is, both responses invoke the modern idea of manipulability of the world, a dimension of modernity that is grounded in a Faustian logic of mastery of the world (Berman 1982). What emerged out of not least the Industrial and Democratic Revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries was the imaginary that man could shape the world and human society according to his (less so her) own wishes, not least by penetrating its complexities through Reason. Modernity as a condition can be understood as inherently favouring the human ideation and pursuit of utopias in the sense of imaginary, but ultimately deemed realizable, representations of a perfect world. The idea of modern society is, in this, the incarnation of the modern utopia, that is, a plastic and perfectable form of the human community. The first substantiation of this idea of modern, plastic society was industrial society, as in its realized form leading to affluence, civic order, and freedom, and as it was reflected in ultimately positive ways in the social theory of Paul Blokker is a postdoctoral fellow at the department of Sociology, University of Trento, Italy. His research is situated within the themes of Social and Political Theory, Varieties of Modernity, European integration, the Constitutionalization of Europe, Diversity in Europe, and Romanian and Eastern European modernities. His latest book is Multiple Democracies in Europe. Political Culture in New Member States (Routledge, 2009). 9

10 early sociologists such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. But modern society in its utopian guise can be thought of in very different ways, that is, it is open to different imaginations. More concretely, specific views and aspects of utopian modern society are open to criticism, and can succumb to estimations of negative sides, as became particularly clear in later sociological work, such as that of Emile Durkheim ( anomie ), Max Weber ( disenchantment ), or the political economy of Karl Marx (for the latter, industrial society was far from a utopia, and its utopian dimension could only be realized by means of the destruction of capitalist relations, if not of the ideals of industrialism, technological progress, and Ideas of coherence, order, progress, evolution and the possibility of human intervention have, however, been subject to continuous critique as well as have run up against the contingencies of history order). Modernity can be seen as exactly the breeding ground for such alternative imaginations, in that in the modern condition the markers of certainty have dissolved (Lefort 1988), that is, the foundations of social order are not any more grounded in religion or natural views of the world, and modernity is therefore characterized by a profound indeterminacy and contingency. It can, however, be argued that the inherent openness of the modern condition what I have just indicated as the absence of any markers of certainty has been continuously subject to attempts at closure, that is, attempts at portraying the world in certain terms and as ultimately manipulable. In other words, in particular through modern utopian politics, various attempts have been made to create certainty by invoking ideas of progress, order, and manipulability of the social world. Examples are the 19th century liberal narrative of modernity, closely related to the bourgeois world of urban industriousness, and the 20th century view of organized modernity in the form of the Keynesian welfare state (Wagner 1994). The most closed form could arguably be found in the Soviet version of totalitarian modernity. Ideas of coherence, order, progress, evolution and the possibility of human intervention have, however, been subject to continuous critique as well as have run up against the contingencies of history. In some ways, then, the modern condition can be seen as consisting of a dialectics of openness and closure. But while earlier attempts at closure could in some ways suspend contingency and uncertainty by means of a retreat into the relative manageability of the national state, it can be argued that increased visibility of forms of globalization since the late 1960s, and with it the evermore evident questionability of some of the key premises of the structure of national states (state sovereignty, homogenous identities, citizenship, shared values and traditions) have made any attempt of a retreat into (and ultimately precarious) tranquility of national utopia seem less and less plausible. The nation-state as a temporary settlement of the utopian question seems at least in some of its more essentialistic interpretations - to have run its course. This relative anachronicity of the nation-state as a natural container for human society, and in this for utopian projects, has evidently been widely discussed in the context of the European integration project. But the modern conditionality seems difficult to let go off fully. That is, in moments of crisis (such as most would agree we currently find ourselves in, and not anymore purely in economic terms, as Angela Merkel has attested recently by linking a failure of the Euro with a failure of the European project as such), politics tends to return

11 to instruments that show strong affinity with the nation-state project, such as protectionism, national instead of European solidarity (Greece is a clear case in point), an emphasis on identity politics in terms of national traditions and achievements (Britishness, Dutchness...). It would, however, appear that the national context cannot provide the answers and the certainty inspire utopian views that it allegedly once could. What instead would seem to be a more promising way out of a closure of politics through utopian politics, that is, the idea that some modern society, free of conflict, can be achieved once and for all, and with this, the completion of modernity, would be a radically different imagery of politics. The latter would need to enclose rather than counter indeterminacy and reflexivity, and would in this be closer to the open, inclusive dimension of modernity. Such an imagery would not take the nation-state and other existing institutions for granted, would need to be sensitive towards the incompleteness and fragility of any knowledge, and therefore be more conducive to civic and political dialogue, and the radical revisiting of what is projected as self-evident (such as notions of progress, growth, etc.). It is unfortunately often overlooked that one way of imagining such an alternative view of politics not as technocratic fabrication but as ongoing and inclusive deliberation over ultimate ends can be found in the recent history of Europe itself, that is, in the notion of radical self-limitation that emerged in the revolutions of Those revolutions could be read as a rejection of the grand narratives of the past and of unshakeable visions of the future. This could be translated into the idea that democratic politics should be open to many voices (and not confined to technocratic elites and their rationalities), and should fundamentally preserve an idea of uncertainty, rather than persevere in the pursuit of unreachable utopias. References Berman, Marhsall (1983), All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity, London: Verso. Lefort, Claude (1988), Democracy and Political Theory, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Wagner, Peter (1994), A sociology of modernity: liberty and discipline, London/New York: Routledge. 11

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13 Post-Autopia as a Dystopian Digital Nexus? Kingsley Dennis The image of the automobile being the gateway to unfettered freedoms and branded as the ultimate spontaneous get away has long been sold to privileged societies as a mobile utopia. Mobility is now a much-heralded paradigm that merges and remakes connectivity as physical and digital networks are being constructed at increasingly accelerating speeds. This paradigm also considers that technological infrastructures will enable people to be more individually mobile in physical-digital space, forming increased small world connections and facilitating lifestyles on the go. Yet inherent in this mobility paradigm is a more troubling underside: namely, that the 21st century will be a site and space of increasingly restrictive surveillance and digital infrastructures. In this short paper I wish to address the aspect of technology to the future of automobility 1. The trend in automobility infrastructures has been towards embedding information within architectural places/spaces and moving objects. This has enabled the construction of communicative relations between cars, roads, and the environment. The aim of these shifts is said to be in favour of safety whereby technology is to take some degree of autonomy away from the driver so that response-reaction times can be quickened under such automation. In other words, the cars take on some of the responsibility in communicating their presence to other cars similarly to how people signal their presence to others within a social context. For example, a German research project envisions a peer-to-peer network for vehicles on a road passing data back and forth (Ward, 2007). Likewise, the Car-2-Car Communication Consortium 2 is a non-profit organisation set-up by several European vehicle manufacturers for researching and developing road traffic safety by means of inter-vehicle communications. Already Audi, BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Fiat, Renault and Volkswagen have formed the Car-2-Car Communications Consortium to seek consensus on standards for dedicated short range communication (DSRC) communication (Bell 2006: 148). This could represent a major shift in how car mobility is reconstituted: as a networked system rather than as separate iron cages, as a potentially integrated nexus rather than as a parallel series. Such networked communications will be central to how the current car system based on self-directing autonomy may shift over to a post-car nexus system of increased digitised automation and management. The so-called mobile utopia may turn out to consist of the necessity of shifting onto digital intelligent infrastructures in order to coerce automobility into manageable systems. 1 Other important issues such as fuel/energy systems; pollution; urban density, etc, whilst significant will not be covered in this paper. 2 See Kingsley Dennis is an expert in complexity theory, and modeling complexity theory for sociotechnical environments. He has co-authored with John Urry After the Car (Polity, 2009) which examines post-peak oil societies and mobility. He is currently working on his next book, A radical new world: Moving through the worldshift before us (Inner Traditions). 13

14 ! Car Assemblage! Transport! Structures Digital Networked Infrastructures Digitised! Databasing! Picture 1. The digital nexus of post-autopia In this scenario digital networks will sort, categorize, and permit automobility through coded spaces. This shift will be made possible through a number of converging factors: the growth in digital technologies; the rise in complex, systemic thinking; the need for secure spaces; and the necessity to move away from individualised and unrecorded forms of automobility that are contributing to climate degradation. Such a re-configuration of existing infrastructure systems will be promoted as leading to increased capacity, greater efficiency; increased safety and security; decreased environmental impact; and an improved longevity. However, the development of such infrastructures requires networks, control systems, built-in resilience, transportation hubs/nodes, pervasive software, and regulated forms of social management. Also of concern is the potential of national transportation systems to be transformed into a westernised form of centralised control obsessive with security and stability mediated through digitised networks of surveillance and management (Surveillance Society Network, 2006). Concerns of privacy may well be lifted onto a wholly new level an era of postprivacy where access through mediated spaces requires giving up privacy; to submit details of personal information in order to gain passage of access. Modern technological cities have become machinic complexes of spaces and flows of production, distribution, and consumption; they merge the industrial and civil into sociotechnical hybrid systems. Such hybrid systems are formed from transport, energy, media, and other mobilities that are linked into intelligent infrastructures. The cities and urban spaces of developed, and in some cases developing, regions are becoming computerised constructs, increasingly invisibly coded and ubiquitous (Graham, 2004b; 2005). It may well be that these digital coded spaces will act to enable/permit, or block/refuse future automobility. Here I view a post-autopia as playing a key role in how physical landscapes and spaces in urban environments are being re-configured in relation to digital hybridisations of complex efficiency and control. In picture 1, I offer a diagrammatic representation of this digital nexus of post-autopia. What

15 I envisage here is that future automobility will increasingly become embedded within a digital computerised environment in which neither exists separate from the other. Physical and digital connections will form hybrid linkages that are pivotal to developing a symbiotic socialisation that places symmetric encounters/movements with asymmetric mobilities and networks. Latham and Sassen refer to these digital formations that require a social context as sociodigitization (Latham and Sassen, 2005). Automobility is being rendered into flows of information and digital database-ization that coordinate, facilitate, or block passage. Infrastructure networks serve as physical assets, as mediating channels that constitute the networked character of modern societies. Urban structures will serve as data nodes that will increasingly construct modern technological spaces as intertextual zones (Thrift and French, 2002). Such a functional calculative background based on complex flows of coded systems will merge and share data with increasingly pervasive digital infrastructures and databases. What may result from this glorified post-autopia is a new era of social sorting of automobility through intelligent digital infrastructures that will emerge first in richer and more developed markets. Graham s term for this style of social coded space is software-sorted geographies in which selective access is organized and permitted (Graham, 2004a). Without these coded assemblages and techniques, much automobility will be rendered inconvenient, if not impossible. For example, levels of road pricing may designate high demand urban corridors that are designed for specific traffic and premium road space, with access to these e-highways being technologically enforced (Graham, 2004a). The social implications of software-sorting may be significant for creating fractured, or tiered, privatised automobility underneath the seemingly smooth scapes of surface flows. For a post-autopia digital nexus to function, access to road space would likely shift to become a privatised and priced commodity, dependent on users having the technology standardised in their cars, and the resources, such as finance and flexible time, to engage with the mobile nexus of individualised yet networked travel. Such travel and mobility infrastructures will need to be interconnected with datastructures which in turn will provide the framework for the corporate privatisation of cities, roads, and cost quantified movement. It may be that a post-autopia will be constructed around further social inequalities and a splintered urbanism (Graham and Marvin, 2001). In order to efficiently manage such a widespread digital nexus I foresee the likely rise in private corporations that will emerge to oversee this function. The privatisation of information, as has already occurred with private credit database companies such as Experian 3, is set to become an area of commercial growth. Similar to how toll-roads in Europe have been developed by the private sector the physical/digital convergence of transport management is likely to be developed by private corporations following capitalist strategies. As profits are central to how corporate institutions run civil enterprises this is likely to spur development of automated and computerised management systems. Intrinsic to the move to increased systemised automation is the involvement of corporate growth in the privatisation of spaces; both spaces of movement as well as spaces of information and legitimate mobility. Issues around information privacy, surveillance, and controlled access may not only be centralised by state bodies but is likely to be dispersed amongst a range of private and civil bodies. 3 See What I envisage here is that future automobility will increasingly become embedded within a digital computerised environment in which neither exists separate from the other 15

16 Central to this is the efficient sharing and cross-referencing of information and data between institutions and their various databases. Conclusion The days of the automobile being the gateway to unfettered freedoms and spontaneous get away are surely numbered. This concept of the car is likely to be no longer sustainable in dense urban regions given the increase in car users, and the foreseeable increase in road congestion problems in city areas and privatised routes. The sheer complexity of integrated issues, from individual user rights, individualised pricing schemes, car security, identity validation, etc, will require complex systems of informational databases and coded spaces. I foresee a post-autopia that necessitates a move into datastructures as a dominant form of social-sorting within which automobility will be negotiated and permitted. This scenario of increased technological interdependency will be a rational and logical outcome from an ongoing development in increased informational processes that are required to control and organize these flows, both efficiently and profitably (Beniger, 1986). The potential emergence of a post-autopia digital nexus may turn out to be not a deliberate form of oppressive control but an institutional-bureaucratic obsession with function, with the smooth flow of goods and services, and with efficiencies of movement and transactional fluidity (Wood and Graham, 2006: 182). In other words, post-autopia will require its own digitalisation as a means of mediating its own organisational principle. This dystopian digital nexus of post-autopia may turn out not only increasingly probable, but rather necessary. Then will it become clear what Mumford meant decades before when he said that the only cure for this disease is to rebuild the whole transportation network on a new model (Mumford, 1964 [1953]: 10). Only that Mumford probably had a more utopian idea in mind rather than the dystopian mesh that may emerge into play. Post-autopia come nesso digitale distopico? L immagine dell automobile come portale verso libertà senza limiti, commercializzata come l ultima fuga spontanea, è stata venduta a lungo come utopia mobile nelle società privilegiate. Il paradigma delle mobilità è oggi centrato sulle trasformazioni della connettività in coincidenza con la costruzione a ritmi sempre più accelerati di reti fisiche e digitali. Questo paradigma sottolinea che le infrastrutture tecnologiche consentiranno alle persone di essere più mobili individualmente in uno spazio fisico-digitale, formando connessioni che rimpiccioliscono il mondo e facilitando stili di vita in movimento. Tuttavia c è anche un aspetto più preoccupante in questo nuovo paradigma, vale a dire il fatto che il ventunesimo secolo sarà uno spazio e un tempo di sorveglianza sempre più restrittiva. In questo breve articolo vorrei occuparmi di comprendere meglio il futuro tecnologico del sistema dell automobilità 1. La tendenza principale delle infrastrutture dell automobilità si orienta sempre più verso l inserimento di 1 Questioni altrettanto importanti come quelle energetica, dell inquinamento, della densità urbana e così via non potranno essere qui affrontate.

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